Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
2d 1067
an entry card with the Bureau of Land Management's State Office. Priority of
filing is determined by a public drawing, and a lease is issued to the first
drawee qualified to receive a lease. 43 C.F.R. 3112.1, 3112.4-1.
Qualifications for a lessee are set forth in the regulations, which require the
listing of certain information on the entry card including the right to hold
interest and parties to the offer. A corporation, such as BEST, is subject to a
further requirement; in compliance with 43 C.F.R. 3102.4-1, its offer must be
accompanied by a statement showing corporate information or must list the
serial number of the BLM file in which such information has been previously
filed.
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At the March 6, 1974, drawing for the parcels in New Mexico, BEST's entry
card on Parcel 19 was drawn first. It was subsequently rejected for failure to
meet the corporate qualifications requirement, as no affidavit of corporate
qualifications was attached nor was there any reference on the card to BEST's
serial number, since such information about BEST was already on file.
BEST then appealed to the Interior Board of Land Appeals. The Board upheld
the State Office's rejection of BEST's offer for failure to include information
required by regulation. 18 IBLA 25. Compliance at the time of filing a
noncompetitive offer was held to be a reasonable requirement and one
consistently enforced by the Secretary in noncompetitive drawings.
Upon appeal to the District Court, the parties submitted briefs in support of
each one's motion for summary judgment, and the court, after review of those
briefs, granted the Government's motion without opinion. It is from this order
that BEST now appeals.
A review of previous agency rulings regarding this regulation and others like it
convinces us that the Secretary was acting within his discretion and his decision
was not arbitrary or capricious.
BEST's arguments against the Secretary's ruling assert an ambiguity in the entry
card, the directory nature of the applicable regulation, and the inconsistent
treatment of lease offers by the Secretary.
It is true the entry card in use at the time of BEST's offer did not provide a
designated space for corporate information or a corporate serial number. It did,
however, state a caveat reminding the applicant that he had to comply with 43
C.F.R. 3102, which states the corporate qualifications requirements. This is
sufficient notification of the need to comply. The absence of specific blanks on
the entry card, however helpful they might have been, should not be considered
sufficiently misleading to require construction against the agency providing the
form. See Silver Monument Minerals Inc., 14 IBLA 137 (1974), citing cases.
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Secretary's actions within the class he rejects such bids. Silver Monument,
supra; Texas American Corp., 14 IBLA 217 (1974).
13
BEST has presented no argument justifying its claim that the Secretary acted in
an arbitrary or capricious fashion in upholding the State Office's rejection of
BEST's offer for Parcel 19. Nor did the Secretary abuse his discretion in so
holding. As there was no disputed evidence here, the District Court correctly
granted the United States' motion for summary judgment without detailing the
supportive facts. Heber Valley Milk Co. v. Butz, 503 F.2d 96 (10th Cir.);
Nickol v. United States, 501 F.2d 1389 (10th Cir.).
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AFFIRMED.